Can students opt out of new standardized tests?

Updated 11:08 pm, Saturday, April 26, 2014

What can Greenwich students do when the district gives the new Common Core exams?

Administrators say there is only one answer: Students must take the tests.

But others assert the question is multiple choice: Students can take the tests -- or they can decide to sit them out.

With the arrival of the new assessments in town Monday, local debate is heating up.

Anonymous fliers calling on students to skip the exams have been circulating in the district, notably at Greenwich High School. One of them includes a form for parents to sign to authorize their children to opt out.

District officials have responded by dismissing the opt-out forms as fake and reiterating their intent for all students in the tested grades to sit for the exams.

"Let me be crystal clear: Per federal and state regulations, students do not have an `opt out' option with the Smarter Balanced field test," Superintendent of Schools William McKersie said in a letter Thursday to district families.

But that statement was contradicted recently by a top educational authority in the state -- the chairman of the state Board of Education, who, ironically, is a major supporter of the new tests.

"There's certainly no state law that says they can't (opt out)," Chairman Allan Taylor, an attorney, said during a March 12 hearing of the state Legislature. "Therefore, residually, presumably they have that right. What the local district chooses to do about that is a local district decision ... The state Department of Education will not be reaching down and sanctioning parents."

This week, students throughout the district will start taking online "field tests" or pilot versions of the new exams, which were developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Aligned with the Common Core State Standards, the exams are replacing Connecticut Mastery Tests in grades three through eight and most of the Connecticut Academic Performance Tests in grade 10. High school students will take the new tests in 11th grade.

This year's exams will not be used for school-accountability purposes or factored into teacher evaluations. The "operational" roll out of the Smarter Balanced tests will be in 2015.

But state education officials are adamant that this year's "test of the test" does not mean students can blow them off.

"Both state and federal laws require public school students to take annual state assessments in certain grades and subjects," said state Department of Education spokeswoman Kelly Donnelly. "These laws do not provide a provision for parents to `opt-out' their children from taking state tests. These mandates have been in effect for many years, and the State Department of Education, as well as all public schools, must comply."

"There's no punishment in either state or federal law for students who refuse to take the test," Lecker said. "They're telling a partial truth when they say that there's no opt-out provision. But they don't tell parents that there's no sanction if they refuse.

"`Will my child or me get punished if we don't take the test?' -- that's really what parents are asking. Why does the state have to play with semantics?"

Students who choose not to take the test will be marked as "left blank," affecting Greenwich's participation rates, said Assistant Superintendent Irene Parisi. But the consequences for those students, if any, have not been settled.

"I don't have an answer for you right now about that," Parisi said.

As for repercussions for the district, opt-outs would have to rise into the hundreds for Greenwich to fall below the 95 percent participation rate mandated by federal law. But even in that scenario, sanctions would not be imminent.

"If the district falls below the 95 percent federally required level, then there may ultimately financial consequences to the district down the line," state board chair Taylor told legislators last month. "But that's a long way down the line."

Early indicators do not point to a revolt in Greenwich. In a soft launch, seventh-graders at Eastern and Western middle schools started taking the exams this past week because of rescheduling to accommodate those schools' eighth-grade trips to Washington, D.C.

"When I visited the schools, all students were engaged, and no one refused" to take the tests, Parisi said in an email Friday.

Eastern's PTA co-presidents, Anne Pfetsch and Susan Bickham, said in an email Friday that they have not heard from any parents at their school about opting out.